The present invention relates to an article store and to a deflecting arrangement for the article store.
Such article stores are known to be incorporated between production and packaging, in order to form a buffer zone in the event of operation being disrupted during production and/or packaging. The products, e.g. chocolate bars with or without packaging, which are supplied in rows by an entry conveyor are optimally intended to be fed to the packaging machines continuously and without any gaps between them.
British Patent Application GB 2 124 574 A presents an article store which is arranged as a buffer zone between two processing apparatuses and has a vertical section and a horizontal section in each case. A vertically or horizontally displaceable deflecting arrangement is arranged here at the end of each section. The deflecting arrangements are connected to one another by means of a tensioning mechanism such that they can only be displaced together when the chain tensioning is maintained.
In this case, the two chains are equipped individually with “article holders”. These article holders are fastened rigidly, i.e. in a non-rotatable manner, on the chains, so that the products located on the article holders are caused, by the system, to change position in the region of the chain-deflecting means. They are completely upended here, i.e. turned through 180°, which of course, in the case of products lying loosely on shelves, is not an option since such products, i.e. chocolate bars, have to remain in position all the way from loading to unloading.
Furthermore, the apparatus described in British Patent Application GB 2 124 574 requires detectors 7a, 7b, 7c in order to establish where the carriage which carries the articles is located at present. This operation of establishing the current carriage position is important in order to be aware of the filling state of the store and to know when the store is empty or full.
It is also the case that the known designs, for example according to European Patent Application EP 1 331 181 A1, do not take account of the fact that, as they pass the deflecting arrangements, the gondolas loaded with shelves have to operate with a relatively large spacing between them in order that collisions between adjacent gondolas can be reliably avoided. However, this vastly reduces the amount of storage space available. Since the conveying chains, furthermore, have to cover the capacity-reducing distances between the gondolas, it is thus also the case that the loading-cycle and unloading-cycle rate is reduced to a considerable extent.
The object of the present invention is to eliminate these disadvantages of the main apparatuses and to propose an article store and a deflecting arrangement for an endless, driven pair of chains which serves for transporting articles, is arranged on a common axis and on which the articles which are to be transported are suspended in gondolas which are mounted for swinging action. One aim of the present invention is to allow the gondolas to follow immediately one after the other, i.e. at a spacing which is appropriate for cyclic operation and, in the vertical regions of the gondola path, corresponds to the spacing between adjacent shelves, so that there is no need to provide any specific step in between in order to bridge the spacings between the gondolas. A further aim of the present invention, in addition, is to manage with a fraction, e.g. a third, of the chain length in comparison with the conventional stores having a similar storage capacity and to improve the cycle rates for loading and unloading to a considerable extent, i.e. more or less to double them. This measure, furthermore, results in a considerable reduction in costs for set-up and installation.
This object is achieved, thanks to the present invention, by the combination of features defined in specification.